The invention relates to a replaceable wear pad for a crawler track of a tracked vehicle, in particular for construction machinery, as well as a method for manufacturing wear pads for a crawler track.
Replaceable wear pads for crawler tracks are known from prior art, which are suitable for being fastened to a base plate of the crawler track in a detachable manner.
The wear pads include, for instance, two reinforcing bars running in longitudinal direction of the wear pad, with two screw threads of retaining screws projecting from the said reinforcing bars towards the bottom side of the wear pad. The retaining screws are guided through holes of the reinforcing bars and are secured against twisting in a suitable manner.
When manufacturing these wear pads, the reinforcing bars with retaining screws inserted through corresponding holes at their ends are therefore molded-in by the wear pad material.
A disadvantage of this design is that the wear pad material also accumulates beneath the reinforcing bar during the moulding-in operation. This has the disadvantage that the bolted connections with the base plate loosen again during operation because of the soft polyurethane material between the reinforcing bar and the base plate, so that the bolted joints must be re-tightened on a regular basis. The reason for this being that the polyurethane layer between the reinforcing bar and the base plate prevents that the pre-tension of the bolted joint can be permanently maintained. It is understood that, with up to 50 wear pads per crawler track unit and with four crawler track units per machine, a considerable time effort results for re-tightening the bolted joints, which results in increased costs and an increased time requirement.
A further disadvantage of the stud bolts projecting from the wear pads is that they cause an increased transport volume and that the thread of the stud bolts may be damaged during transport.
A further disadvantage of the wear pads with projecting stud bolts is that care must be taken during moulding to protect the thread of the stud bolt from being coated with the polyurethane material during the moulding operation.